Lost World, Lost Hearts

 

Just been chewing over things with Jane since she got back this afternoon and, apart from a lot of tragic stuff regarding friends that I won't offer, I lit upon a small and seemingly insignificant event from yesterday afternoon. I was out for a pint with Joe, in The Bull, jangling and railing at the world as only two old geezers can, when I became aware of two youngish blokes - late twenties at most - sat at the opposite table. For the duration of the first pint Joe & I drank, these two sat and stared at their phones - obviously watching videos - and said not one word to each other, or even appeared to recognize they were actually participating in a social situation.

And therein lies the rub. Social interaction appears now for anyone - not all, for there are dissidents of all ages and social backgrounds out there - to equate solely to their interaction on social media. Human-human interaction has largely been demoted to some netherworld of un-technologically-mediated pariah-hood, deemed in some way to be a bit too, well, icky and visceral: real, even. Now, I've always been an early adopter of technology, as I've mentioned before [blog-posts passim], and can claim to have been an Apple fanboy for forty years; but I sometimes think that their [Apple's] decision to pretty much invent the modern smartphone and kick the nascent ecology of social media, front and centre, into everyone's lives; in the process spawning an industry that would otherwise have likely languished in its original tech backwaters, may not have been such a good idea after all. Impoverished, despite our riches, we are.

Things social and fashionable are cyclical by their very nature, and I was minded by the above thoughts, of my generation's reaction to the current ethos back in the late sixties and early seventies, when we - at least those of us of a certain ideological bent - chose, for a while at least, to eschew the values of our recent forebears [anyone five years older than us] and do and value pretty much the complete opposite of whatever they had done and valued [I simplify, but I was an adolescent at the time]. All I can say is that, despite the wholesale adoption of this potentially pernicious tech by now, frankly, older people, it's not too late for a timely youthful rebellion against all of this crap. I speak as an older technophile who has, as yet, largely resisted the siren song of 'social' media. Go figure...